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Samples from a horse leg bone more than 700,000 years old have yielded the oldest full genome known to date... The Pleistocene horse genome Orlando and colleagues pieced together helped them determine that the ancestor to the Equus lineage -- the group that gave rise to modern horses, zebras, and donkeys -- arose 4 to 4.5 million years ago, or about two million years earlier than previously thought... The team found that Przewalski's horses were an offshoot of the lineage that gave rise to domestic horses. The two groups diverged around 50,000 years ago... The six-inch (15-centimeter) horse leg bone...

Well-preserved specimen pushes back the timing of modern horse evolution. A group of Przewalski's horses, once considered extinct in the wild. Photograph by Michael Nichols, National Geographic Photograph courtesy D.G. Froese via Nature DNA shines a light back into the past, showing us things that fossils can't. But how far back can that light extend? Some of the oldest DNA sequences come from mastodon and polar bear fossils about 50,000 and 110,000 years old, respectively. But a new study published online today in the journal Nature reports the latest in the push for recovering ever more ancient DNA sequences. Samples...